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One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to publish a real live playlist, one that links to real music, but for whatever reason, I never seem to be able to. If you guys have an easy way to do it, please let me know. I’ve tried a few services and they fail me, or, perhaps more aptly, I fail at them. Anyway, here’s a screengrab of the playlist I used at the Web 2 Summit this year. I always pick music that has inspired me during the preparation for the event, which takes a good ten months. Many of these bands I’ve seen live, and I hope you enjoy them as I have!

Postings have been and, through this week, will continue to be pretty light. The reason: I’m hosting, with my partner Tim O’Reilly, the seventh annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

There should be a lot of news here, starting with some of our own – for the first time ever the Web 2 Summit will be livestreamed, for free, to anyone. The stream can be embedded anywhere, so I’m adding it to this site below. If you can’t make it in person, well, now you can check it out on the web.

Enjoy! (Update – so far, nearly 75,000 folks have watched the livestream. That’s pretty cool – about one hundred times the number of folks in the room at any give time!)

I met with Ev at Twitter headquarters yesterday, a prelude to our conversation in less than two weeks time at Web 2 (I also spoke with him last year). As usual he was in a thoughtful mood, though an unexpected visit from Biz added some levity to the proceedings.

Williams will be the final speaker at Web 2 this year, a program that begins with Eric Schmidt, continues with Robin Li, Ari Emmanuel, Shantanu Narayen, Jim Balsille, Mark Zuckerberg, Carol Bartz, and so many more.

So by the time we get to Ev’s session, something of a grand narrative should have unfolded, if I’ve done my job right. And it feels right to me to conclude with Twitter, because it is at once the growth story of the year, as well as the enigma – what, exactly, *is* Twitter, now that the service is pushing 200 million users and on the verge of a truly scaleable revenue model?

I found Ev’s thoughts refreshing. He recently handed the CEO title over to Dick Costolo (see my interview of him here), and is focusing on product. As we spoke, however, it strikes me that “product’ is a bit too pedestrian a term for the issues and opportunities that Ev is tackling. They have a tiger by the tail. But what, exactly, is the nature of this tiger?

Twitter is a service, most would say, one that, by its own definition, is “the best way to discover what’s new in your world.” But it’s also a network, one with important social overtones – Twitter has created a public attention and interest graph. And it’s a platform, on which many developers have created applications and services. And of course it’s an emerging standard, of sorts, not unlike email – a set of protocols for short messaging that has become a de facto standard across the web (including mobile, of course). And related: Twitter is beginning to challenge search in terms of driving referral traffic around the web.

But Twitter wants to be more than just a protocol, Ev tells me, and that leads to perhaps the most contentious debate around the company: Should it be centralized, or decentralized? Those who have invested their time or resources in the Twitter “ecosystem” are increasingly complaining that Twitter should stick to a decentralized service model, letting other companies create value at the point of usage – in essence, let the developers determine how best to use Twitter. After all, that was how the service started. But Twitter has made it clear that it has more robust plans. It’s not that the company doesn’t want developers adding value, Williams argues, it’s that the company wants developers to add value beyond what’s possible right now. And to do that, Twitter has work to do on its own platform.

We’ll be talking about this and much more when we convene in ten days. What do you want to hear about from Ev? Here are a few questions to get your thoughts started, please leave yours in comments.

– How is the “new Twitter” doing? What have you learned from how usage patterns have changed? Can you share any data on how Twitter is being used now that might give us new insights?

– Tell us about the transition from CEO to founder with product focus? How is that going?

– The ongoing grumbling over Twitter obviating developers’ businesses by adding new features and services. What is your philosophy there? What do you wish developers would create that they are not creating now? What work does Twitter have to do to help developers create more sustainable, long term value?

– How are the new ad programs going? Tell us about the tests with HootSuite (in stream promoted tweets). When might we expect this to roll out at scale?

– One of the chief complaints about Twitter is finding relevance and signal from all the tweets. Are you working on this and what might we expect in the future? Might we expect to see “relevance” in the timeline?

– What do you make of the whole “open vs. closed” debate – and the “Web is Dead” meme? Can we unpack the decentralized vs. centralized debate?

– There have been rumors of another big financing. Shall we put them to rest?

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has come to Web 2 as many times as Mark Zuckerberg, and like the Facebook CEO, he’s had one heckuva year. From the fallout with Apple over Flash to the rumors of a Microsoft takeover (which he’s denied), Narayen has had more than his share of challenges this past 12 months. So it should be interesting to hear what he has to say in two weeks time. Tim had some interesting things to say about Adobe in our webcast yesterday, I’ll post a link once the video is live. Meanwhile, what do you want to hear from Narayen?

Continuing my tour of selected speakers at Web 2 this year, I alight upon RIM’s Jim Balsillie, the man responsible for guiding the Blackberry brand through the Skylla of Apple and Kharybdis of Android – or is that the other way ’round?

In any case, RIM has long been the king of enterprise smart phones, but that grip is arguably slipping. However, a suite of new products and an invigorated approach to developers is showing promise. Also eagerly anticipated: The Playbook, RIM’s first tablet product.

Balsille hasn’t been shy when it comes to Apple, he was recently quoted thusly: “We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple.”

Readers of Searchblog already know that Web 2 is coming in less than three weeks, what with all my missives here about Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bartz, and others. But what I haven’t told you about is the “Web2 Debrief” that my company, Federated Media, is doing after the conference.

The Debrief is an evening event directly after the last day of the show, featuring Tim O’Reilly and myself in conversation about the previous three days. We’ll be breaking down the highlights of the event and taking questions from the audience. There will be a distinct focus on what it all means from the point of view of the marketing and/or media business, given FM’s position in those industries.

The nominal ($35) fee helps to cover the food and drink, as well as the excellent venue – Mezzanine, a short walk from the Palace Hotel, where Web 2 Summit will be held. I hope to see you there!

Who exactly is Yuri Milner? I’ve heard this question asked quite a bit over the past year, as the Russian financier and entrepreneur has amassed significant holdings in key US Internet players – from Groupon to Zynga to Facebook (where he now owns around 10% of outstanding shares). His company, DST, has more than a billion invested in these social media players. (IT also purchased ICQ from AOL).

I had a chance to sit down with Milner in my San Francisco office, and ask him a few questions about his philosophy of investing, his background, and his strategy going forward. I’m very pleased he will be joining us at the Web 2 Summit – his approach to investing has upended a lot of presumptions about how “mezzanine” deals are getting done. In short, he cares little for the complicated structures and protective rachets of traditional pre-IPO rounds. He’s forced Silicon Valley legends to sit up and take notice. Oh, and by the way, he also owns major stakes in Russia’s most important social networking and Internet companies.

So what would you ask Yuri Milner? Here are a few thought starters:

– What’s your thesis behind investing? What do you look for when you make an investment?

– Does coming from Russia help or hinder your work? What do you want the Valley to understand about Russia that perhaps we don’t?

– Why do you so fervently believe in Facebook? What keeps you up at night about this investment?

– You are actively involved in your investments. What advice do you give to the CEOs of Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook?

– How do your terms of investment differ from traditional mezzanine players?

– Who are your next targets? Why haven’t you invested in Twitter or Demand Media? Betfair? Are there “types” of companies you are not interested in?

– What is the plan with your Russian properties? Do they have properties that you might export to the US or other markets?

Next month will mark the third time that Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg will sit down with me for a Web 2 interview. (The first is above, the second can be found here). Last year Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joined me, and she was great, but I’m eager to speak with Mark again, given all that has happened in the past year. If you watch his interview in 2007, then a year later, and then his recent appearances, you see a guy who’s really matured as a public figure (and yes, that has a lot of nuance when you run Facebook). Yes, he had a uncomfortable (and famously sweaty) conversation at D earlier this year, but lately I’ve noticed a confidence that I’m going to bet will be on display next month.

Not that we won’t have a few items to cover that will test Zuckerberg’s newfound stage presence, what with congressional inquiries, unflattering Hollywood portrayals, and platform outages to discuss. But if you’re CEO of a very public (though still financially private) company, dealing with these things comes with the territory.

So what would you ask Mark Zuckerberg? Leave your thoughts in comments, and please do the same for Baidu’s Robin Li, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and Google’s Eric Schmidt. Next up will be Yuri Milner, CEO of DST and major investor in Facebook, Groupon, and many others.

Here are some thought starters for Zuckerberg:

– You recently stated that the company is run basically at break even, and that’s OK. Can you unpack that for us? Investors like DST expect a lot more than that at some point, no?

– While we won’t focus on the movie, it’s a hit, so what does he make of it?

– The question of privacy and in particular user controls. Is he satisfied Facebook has done all it should with the new dashboards?

– Instrumentation – why didn’t “friend lists” take off? The new Groups. Is it working?

– Faecbook Open Graph. Will TripAdvisor type integrations become the norm?

– A Facebook ad network off domain. Is that coming, when?

– Google.me. Thoughts on this?

– Twitter…same. Is the Interest graph of interest?

– What is next for the Facebook product? Mark famously loves to work on the product. So what’s he working on?

Please leave your comments here, so Tim and I can do the best interview possible! Thanks.

I’m particularly pleased to welcome Baidu CEO Robin Li to the Web 2 stage this year. Li is a familiar Valley startup success story – he left a promising career at search pioneer Infoseek to found a startup that has rocketed to multi-billion dollar valuations and global business fame. The big difference? Li did it in China.

A one year chart of Baidu’s stock, shown at left, certainly tells a story of success. I spoke to Li earlier in the Fall to prep for our conversation, and found him reserved, intelligent, and perhaps a bit apprehensive. After all, he’s speaking an hour or so after Eric Schmidt, and Baidu is often called “the Chinese Google.” Not to mention the company has profited from Google’s recent decision to, for all intents and purposes, to exit the Chinese market. And I wouldn’t blame him if he’s worried that the industry might call him out for bowing to Chinese policies regarding censorship. But as Li told me, “We’re based in China. We don’t have a choice on this issue.”

American educated, Valley smart, Chinese native, Li is a fascinating study in two cultures. That he’s willing to come and be part of our industry’s conversation says a lot about the man, and I think we’ll all learn from his visit.

Here are some of the things we’ll be discussing, please add your thoughts in comments, and please